SCREENING: Alex Rivera: Sleep Dealer

Alex Rivera: Sleep Dealer

a special film screening event for Digital Latin America

The near future. Like tomorrow. The world is divided by closed borders, but connected by a digital network that ties together people around the world. Memo Cruz lives in the small, dusty Mexican village of Santa Ana del Rio. Santa Ana is the kind of place that seems frozen in time – except for the hi-tech, militarized dam that was built by a corporation, and now controls Santa Ana's water supply. Memo dreams of leaving his small pueblo and finding work in the hi-tech factories in the big cities in the north. To escape, at night, in his room alone, Memo uses a homemade radio intercept to eavesdrop on conversations of people who, unlike him, have been able to leave – and who've made it to the big cities, where almost anything is possible. One night, while using his homemade radio, Memo stumbles across something he's never heard before–the communications of the security forces that control the area around his village, hunting "Aqua-Terrorists."

Filmmaker Alex Rivera says, "I made Sleep Dealer first and foremost because I love science fiction. As a teenager I was fascinated by films like Brazil and Blade Runner. However, as I got older, I realized that despite the genre's wild stories and countless special effects, there were some things that were unimaginable – and that maybe there was an opportunity to do something radically new with sci-fi... Sci-fi films almost always tell outsider stories, critical stories, yet so often the heroes are police or other authority figures. With Sleep Dealer, I wanted to put a new outsider – a would-be-immigrant – at the center of the story."